College Market

Social Networking in the Collegiate Market: Part III (Your Marketing Shouldn’t Come From You)

The collegiate world is separate from all other markets, in a way, because of the social tendencies and unique reliance on peer advice that are prevalent in the collegiate arena. As this white paper from Buzz Logic points out, user generated content and the rise of social networking tools is really just an extension of what every marketer has always known to be the most powerful form of advertising: word-of-mouth. People will always value what their friends say about a product over what they learn from a commercial. Wat used to require a friend with a telephone or a neighbor to chat with across the fence, now only requires a facebook group or any message board on any topic of your liking. The old cliche “everyone is a critic” rings very true in the marketplace, and the booming popularity of online networks has given a worldwide bullhorn to everybody and anybody who wants to use it.

But while word-of-mouth is a strong force in the general marketplace, it is THE force with the college demographic. From the time kids are old enough to understand wrong from right, we start telling them over and over: “Don’t give in to peer pressure!” Generally, we tell them this to keep them away from drugs and alcohol as youngsters, but it seems they never think to resist peer pressure when it involves anything else! How many study sessions or term papers have been procrastinated because a student’s friends decided to go downtown for the night? People frequently observe that as individuals, people are generally pretty smart; it is in groups that the ‘madness of the mob‘ takes over.

This is all to reinforce the picture that people value thier friends’ input over all else. Social networking has enabled an entirely new paradigm for garnering input from your friends. In fact, your ‘friends’ don’t even have to be people you have ever met! Read Robert Scoble’s beliefs about facebook friends for a look at why you can build your online friends network as a diverse rolodex, rather than a tight-knit circle of childhood friends. Facebook has an application called My Questions that allows you to post a question about anything that all your friends can see and answer, thus enabling nearly instantaneous feedback for any decision you might want to make. MySpace has Bulletins that allow for users to pull in opinions from all their friends, as well as having 3rd party services with embeddable polls if you want to get scientific in your opinion-getting. These are just primary services in the two largest social networks…beyond this there are networks, messageboards, review sites, wikis, and product review blogs/podcasts, etc.

But most of these allow you to get input if you know that you want an opinion; none of them reach out and try and tell you why you should/shouldn’t buy a product. For online advertising to be successful in the collegiate market, the advertising needs to turn everyday users into ‘e-vangelists’. If you have a product that will make people sit back and think, “Wow, this is really cool…and it actually benefits me somehow…hmm, maybe my friends will like it too!” you will have it made. This is how my circle of friends began using del.icio.us for sharing links and articles, it is how everyone started using facebook, and it is the same way that iPods became the most ubiquitous product you will see on any college campus in the country. It sort of seems that you need to have an awesome product before you can really leverage the benefits on social marketing…that is exactly the point. If your product is bad, don’t try and force the fit…you will be thrown out of the online community and spurned forever.

If your product isn’t getting the online buzz you think it deserves, jsut back up and figure out how to make it better: how can I make it so people get more functionality from this? How can I make it easier for people to share this product with thier friends? How can I leverage the existing community to provide relevant feedback about my product? Ask these questions, then try again. And again. And again. Stay out of the community…do not ever anonymously plug your own product in a messageboard or on a blog. If you need to comment on something (which I would suggest against), do it with full disclosure.

People care about what they read online and they will respond if they think a product is actually a good fit for them…or they’ll just do it because their friends told them to. Either way, it is good for you. Create a way for people to easily share your product/service with friends..the rest is viral.

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